Every now and then in this oddball journalism business, you meet or interview cranky, sour, sometimes-nutty people.

Balancing that, every now and then you get to meet terrific, inspirational people.

Patty Braun, for example.

I wrote about her for Wednesday’s Leader-Post (see the article here ) after the Royal Canadian Legion announced she’d been this year’s Silver Cross Mother.

This is an honour that no parent wants. One becomes a Silver Cross Mother by losing a child in the military service of Canada.

I missed connecting with Patty on Tuesday, but she dutifully called me on Wednesday, after the paper was out, to chat.

Long story short, she’s not quite sure how this designation came to her, as opposed to the mothers of the other servicemen and servicewomen who have fallen in Afghanistan and on other operations. She remembers a friend asking if she’d consent to filling this post for a year if he started the process, which led to research, then a letter to a member of Parliament. “Somewhere along the line, there was a letter-writing campaign,” said Patty, adding that after her nomination was accepted by the Legion, participants were told to keep mum on this.

Her message to other Canadians, is that, “I guess I want them to know how important, to everyday Canadians, our military is because a lot of the things we enjoy — our freedoms — are due to the thngs that our military has done for us. And that’s very, very important to everyday Canadians.”

What comes after Nov. 11 is unclear. Patty doesn’t expect to do much travelling as Silver Cross Mother.

Of her son, David, killed in 2006 insurgent suicide bombing in Kandahar, she says he was “pretty quiet most of the time; he had good friends, but he had a really sarcastic sense of humour, and didn’t really say a lot unless he was in a discussion.” At his funeral in 2006, eulogists also noted that David became keenly interested in world affairs as he went through high school. After working in Watson, he joined the Canadian Forces in 2002, training as an infantryman.

I am “big” on lifelong learning; I took the liberty of asking Patty what she had learned along the road of life (she became a widow in 1994) about dealing with grief and moving on. Her biggest advice: while every situation is different, never play the “woulda, shoulda, coulda game” of “if I’d had only done such-and-such, then he never would have died.”

Her other advice is something that came out of the repatriation of the coffin carrying David to the air base at Trenton. They watched, then family and friends gathered for a quiet drink and a chat, at which Patty found herself proposing a toast to David, saying, “‘We’re going to keep going. We’re not going to let this get us down. We’re not going to do anything crazy. We’re just going to keep going’ — and I said that if we don’t and David was here, he’d kick our asses!'”

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